Confronting Abuse: Sailing Between Scylla and Charbydis

The seemingly unending sequence of increasingly grotesque revelations about Jimmy Savile that have followed in the wake of ITV’s 3 October broadcast of Exposure: The Other Side of Jimmy has been sickening, but distressing though these stories have been, they give us an opportunity to face the reality of abuse that we would be foolish to surrender.  

Confronting abuse must be done honestly and calmly, however; it is too easy to set up lazy scapegoats or succumb to a witch-hunting mentality. 

Serious questions have, rightly, been asked of the BBC and other institutions with which Savile was linked. The question of whether Savile’s behaviour was deliberately ignored and even concealed is, as in the case of abusive clergy, perhaps the biggest question. “Monsters exist,” wrote the Holocaust survivor Primo Levi, “but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are… the functionaries ready to believe and act without asking questions.” 

Savile

Some, with axes to grind against the BBC, have been eager to believe Savile’s behaviour was deliberately concealed, rather than being facilitated by a wish to believe the best of people and a refusal to face reality. Unfortunately, the media’s natural narrative dynamics contribute to this approach. “The trouble is that the media hates cock-ups as they dilute guilt,” observed Simon Jenkins in The Guardian last week, explaining “a mistake must be rendered a lie, a cover-up and a crisis, so that the cry can go up for heads to roll.”

Investigation

Investigation is clearly needed, but it would be a tragedy if sensationalist storytelling made the BBC an institutional scapegoat, bearer not just of its own sins, but those of a whole society. Child abuse is no more the primary preserve of the British establishment than it was that of the Irish Church, and while concentrating on the past failures of the BBC might make us feel better, it would really be just a form of denial, draining valuable attention and energy away from where they're most needed to acknowledge and tackle abuse across Britain today. 

Sue Berelowitz, Britain’s deputy Children’s Commissioner, reported to the Commons Home Affairs committee in June that sexual exploitation of children is rife throughout urban and rural Britain. Describing in graphic detail the pack-raping of young girls by adolescent males, she insisted that “people need to lay aside their denial”, so that victims can muster the courage to come forward, trusting that they will be believed.

The numbers seem to support Berelowitz’s statement: abuse rates cannot be compared precisely between different countries, as surveys ask different questions and use different definitions and methodologies, but it seems that Britain’s abuse figures are no better than Ireland’s. 

Twenty seven per cent of Irish adults had been victims of childhood sexual abuse, according to the 2002 SAVI stud, which suggests that abuse must have peaked before the 1990s. The NSPCC’s 2011 study, Childhood Abuse and Neglect in the UK Today, found that 24.1pc of British adults between the ages of 18 and 24 had experienced sexual abuse during childhood or adolescence; 65.9pc of the contact sexual abuse reported by those aged 17 and under having been perpetrated by under 18s.  

While we need, therefore, to recognise how widespread abuse is, we need to do so responsibly; there’s a narrow path between denial and hysteria, and the victims of child abuse and our need to tackle abuse as the social pollution that it is will not be well served by a moral panic. 

Dismissive 

People have generally been dismissive of claims by clergy that right through to the 1990s they simply didn’t understand the reality of child sexual abuse. It therefore seemed somewhat disingenuous of Savile’s Radio 1 colleague Paul Gambaccini to say, as he did last week, that it “was considered so far beyond the pale that people didn’t believe it happened”. 

He’s not been alone in saying this, but rather than sneering about double standards and hypocrisy among media types, maybe we should welcome this as a belated recognition that the sexual revolution unleashed a maelstrom of confusion in a more naive world.

In December 2010, Pope Benedict provoked fury from Sinéad O’Connor and others when he told the Roman Curia that, “In the 1970s, paedophilia was theorised as something fully in conformity with man and even with children,” but the evidence shows that Benedict was right.

Sexual liberation had been one of the great ambitions of the student revolutionaries of the late 1960s; a desire to banish sexual repression led to the establishment of several communes and kindergartens in Germany where sexual contact between adults and children was expected. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, now a prominent MEP, described himself in his 1975 book The Great Bazaar as engaging in sexual acts with very young children in one of these kindergartens.

Sexuality

In the mid-1980s, the German Greens’ state organisation in North Rhine-Westphalia argued that “nonviolent sexuality” between children and adults should generally be allowed, while a Green Party task force in Baden-Württemberg wrote in a position paper that “Consensual sexual relations between adults and children must be decriminalised”.

In Britain, on the other hand, the National Council for Civil Liberties – then headed by Britain’s eventual Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt, argued in 1976 that “childhood sexual experiences, willingly engaged in, with an adult result in no identifiable damage… The real need is a change in the attitude which assumes that all cases of paedophilia result in lasting damage.” 

The activist group called the Paedophile Information Exchange ubsequently became affiliated to the NCCL, campaigning for the age of consent to be lowered and opposing bans on child pornography. In the early 1980s the International Gay Association passed motions calling for an international solidarity campaign on behalf of the Paedophile Information Exchange and for the abolition of the age of consent.

Note that Peter says it may be impossible to condone paedophilia

Many of these would-be-liberators acted with sincere – if astonishingly naive – intentions.

The civil rights campaigner Peter Tatchell seems to be their natural heir, writing in 1997 that several of his friends had enjoyed having sex with adults when between the ages of 9 and 13; while not condoning paedophilia, he argued that society should acknowledge that “not all sex involving children is unwanted, abusive and harmful”.*

He’s not alone in arguing that sexual contact between adults and children isn’t always intrinsically harmful; Richard Dawkins writes in The God Delusion that he found being molested “an embarrassing but otherwise harmless experience”, and wonders whether it might be less damaging for children to be sexually abused than to be raised Catholic.

Attitudes to sexuality in the 1970s were chaotic, confused, and naive. Most of us have learned better, but although some of us have been slow to catch up, we need to remember that the past was indeed a different country, and they did things differently there. Blaming people for their historical naivety won’t help us fix today’s problems.

-- Originally published in The Irish Catholic, 1 November 2012.
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* In September 2010 Tatchell claimed that The Guardian edited his letter without his knowledge or consent, but I would be curious if he felt it was edited to a point where he felt that his views had been misrepresented, and if he can prove this. After all, it seems that he was willing to let thirteen years go by before he attempted to disown the letter as published. It's almost as though he was happy with it until people pointed out that he'd publicly said that for adults to have sex with children isn't always abusive, is sometimes wanted by the children, and can be utterly harmless and even enjoyable.

Soapy Operatics

The other evening, while digging through recent tweets, I noticed how a fortnight or so back I’d said, “Hmmm. Must make tea before calling home again. Rang during a proposal in Coronation Street, something which is never mentioned on Twitter.”

And that time I paused, because I honestly couldn’t think of a time I’d noticed anybody talking about Coronation Street on Twitter. Or Eastenders, for that matter. Now, granted, I could just have been filtering out tweets on those topics, but it got me thinking about how roughly a quarter of Britain’s population watch soap operas every week, and yet they seem to go unmentioned on Twitter.

It turns out that there are official Twitter accounts for the two main soaps, with Eastenders’ official account having almost 220,000 followers, and Coronation Street’s having almost 180,000. Not Stephen Fry country – indeed, not even in the range of the QI Elves – but still, it’s not too shabby.

But here’s the thing. It seems that of the almost 800 accounts I follow, just two follow the Eastenders account, and two follow the Coronation Street one. And one of those is the NSPCC.

Am I typical in this regard? Or is it simply the case that Twitterati are radically unrepresentative of the British population – and perhaps the Irish and American ones too -- in general? Food for thought there, methinks.

Now there's a condundrum for you...
So, anyway, this got me thinking about the soaps in general. I’m sorry to say that I’ve probably clocked up a few thousand hours of passive soap-watching over the decades. I don’t think I’ve ever deliberately turned one on, but I’ve certainly been in the room innumerable times when others have been watching Eastenders, Neighbours, Glenroe, Home and Away, and most especially Coronation Street. I have a big family, after all. The telly’s hardly mine to hog.

And while the telly’s been on, there have been plenty of occasions when I’ve not averted my eyes, so I’ve picked up a good broad knowledge of soap operas over the years.

Occasionally I’ve pondered a question memorably put by one of my best friends in Dublin: “What do the regulars in the Rovers Return watch on telly at half-seven on Monday nights?”

The dogs that don't bark...
It’s a fair question. One thing that’s conspicuously absent from Coronation Street, as a milieu, is Coronation Street the programme. Indeed, absent too, as far as I can tell, are Eastenders, Neighbours, Emmerdale, the lot. It seems that Weatherfield is almost the only working class or lower middle-class place in England where nobody watches or talks about soap operas.

I saw ‘almost’, because Walford seems to exhibit the same peculiarity. So, I suspect, does Emmerdale.

Another thing that’s strikingly odd in the two shows I’ve seen are football references. I’ve been assured that football gets mentioned now and again in the shows, but I honestly don’t think I’ve ever noticed it happening.

Weatherfield, it would seem, is a suburb of Greater Manchester where nobody talks about Manchester United or Manchester City, and where the pub is singularly devoid of crowds of burly men shouting obscenities at a big screen. And, just as eerily, although Eastenders occasionally features a mention of Walford Town FC, we never see people camping out in front of the Queen Vic’s telly to watch West Ham, that being, I think, the local team.

Spectator sport, it would seem, is unheard of on Coronation Street and Albert Square. I can’t remember whether it was ever mentioned on Brookside Close. Is it tenable that this was the only street in Merseyside where nobody talked of Everton and Liverpool?

Were Merseyside’s two great teams ever mentioned in Grange Hill, for that matter, when the school was inexplicably relocated there from London in 2003, thus rendering nonsensical the teasing Ziggy had received for his Scouse accent back in the 80s?

Sometimes historians have so little to go on...
All of which leads me to think that we’d be in quite the pickle if future historians were left to rely on soap operas and the usual incomplete archaeological remains to figure out what life was like in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Britain.

What would they conclude? That ordinary English people didn’t watch drama programmes on television – so that the shows that had somehow survived must have been elite entertainments. That they didn’t partake in spectator sports, and rarely engaged in any physical activities. That their social lives revolved around drinking establishments called pubs, which were perennially popular and oblivious to outside social factors. That religion played almost no part in their lives, save sometimes at weddings and funerals. That adultery, abuse, rape, and murder were the small change of their miserable lives.

That those lives were short, with Londoners rarely making it past their mid-forties, and Scousers being lucky to reach their mid-twenties, though lifespans in Manchester were seemingly rather longer than those in London.

And then, just to complicate matters...

And, of course, if they were particularly unlucky they might also have a couple of episodes of Doctor Who, to really confuse them. If they had ‘Army of Ghosts’, for instance, they’d see the Doctor and Rose Tyler sitting in Jackie Tyler’s living room, flicking through the channels to see Eastenders’ own Peggy Mitchell confronting a spectral cyberman in the Queen Vic.

“Listen to me, Den Watts! I don’t care if you ‘ave come back from the grave. Get outta my pub! The only spirits I’m serving in this place are gin, whisky, and vodka. So you ‘eard me – get out!”
The Doctor turns off the programme, and turning to Jackie says,“When did it start?”
“Well, first of all, Peggy heard this noise in the cellar, so she goes down - ”
“No,” he says, “I mean worldwide.”

Might the historians of the future think this is metafiction? Well, you’d hope so, not least because of the improbable suggestion in it that ordinary people obsessively watched soap operas, which they would of course know to be false.*

Of course, if they had more than ‘Army of Ghosts’ to rely on, they’d realise that Doctor Who and Eastenders share a fictional continuity**, with the Doctor having visited Walford in 1993’s Dimensions in Time, where the third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh incarnations of the Doctor, not to mention a medley of companions, battled the Rani, caught in timeloops that saw them visiting Albert Square as it was in 1973, 1993, and what appears to be an alternative 2013 where Kathy Beale, Pauline Fowler, Frank Butcher and Pat Evans are all mysteriously still alive.***

This might lead them to think that Eastenders is no more realistic than Doctor Who, or it might lead them to think that this is just a straightforward way of making Doctor Who seem more credible, on the Henry James principle that “a good ghost story ... must be connected at a hundred points with the common objects of life.”

Or it might lead them to think that Doctor Who accurately depicts modern British life too, with Eastenders being a reality TV show within the Doctor Who continuum, which might at least explain why Jackie watches it.

But that’s a whole other topic. Whatever way we look at it, it'd probably lead to some very strange documentaries.

________________________________________________________
* Especially if they had Twitter to go by.
** Subtly different from Red Dwarf, which though set in the same fictional continuum as Coronation Street is explicitly stated as taking place in a different dimension.
*** Don't even think of saying that as a 'Children in Need' special it doesn't count. Nobody says that about 'Time Crash'.

Remember, Remember

A couple of years ago I had rather a long discussion with an evangelical Anglican friend of mine, a mathematician of Calvinist inclinations, about Foxe's Book of Martyrs and perhaps the most famous passage in that dubious old tome, this being his account of the execution of bishops Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley on 16 October 1555. I was trying to explain that Latimer's celebrated exhortation to Ridley was almost certainly a pious fiction.

Play the Man...

Most of you know the line, I expect. I first learned it when I read Ray Bradbury's brilliant Fahrenheit 451 eight or nine years back:

"They crashed the front door and grabbed at a woman, though she was not running, she was not trying to escape. She was only standing, weaving from side to side, her eyes fixed upon a nothingness in the wall as if they had struck her a terrible blow upon the head. Her tongue was moving in her mouth, and her eyes seemed to be trying to remember something, and then they remembered and her tongue moved again:

'Play the man, Master Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.'"

What a line. What a cry to confidence. What panache. What rot.

The first edition of Foxe's Book of Martyrs carries no trace of this line, which seems, in any case, a tad eloquent for a man about to be burned alive -- it certainly doesn't really tally with Latimer's behaviour and words as otherwise related by Foxe. The account of the executions in Foxe's first edition was clearly based on the detailed eyewitness accounts given him by Augustine Bernher and George Shipside, both of whom were close associates of Ridley and Latimer. 

Absent from the 1563 edition, but present in the 1578 one, the question is how did it come about? Granted, Foxe sought for further information when expanding his original text, but he'd clearly gone to great effort in his first edition to get his account of Latimer and Ridley's executions as accurate as possible, and it's difficult to see why Bernher and Shipside would have refrained from sharing this detail with him, were it authentic.

It seems that somebody must have provided Foxe with this surely fictional detail at some point between the publications of his first and second editions, with Foxe eagerly accepting it as true, given how his description of the executions already echoed how the Apostolic father St Polycarp of Smyrna met his fate; Eusebius' account of Polycarp's death records that a voice had cried out "Be strong, Polycarp, and play the man."

Written by the Winners...

Foxe is a tricky source for historians, as it's very clear that it was written as propaganda, and indeed is a classic case of history being written by the victors -- which isn't always the way, for what it's worth -- and recently-persecuted victors at that. It's ultimately no more trustworthy than, say, a history of British involvement in Ireland as published by the IRA would be. 

The first English edition was published under state auspices a handful of years into Elizabeth's reign as a way of promoting the independence of Elizabethan England by showing that the Catholic Church was a brutal and cruel Antichrist. Foxe had begun work some years earlier, initially relying on propagandist tracts, designed to encourage opposition to the regime of Mary I, as his earliest sources. 

Unfortunately, Foxe was systematically used as state propaganda for centuries afterwards. As Diarmaid McCullough says in Reformation:

"From his various refuges in the exile communities abroad Foxe began gathering material which placed England Protestant sufferings against the background of the international fight with Antichrist. As Acts and Monuments, its English version first published in 1563 in the safety of Elizabeth’s reign and quickly nicknamed ‘Foxe’s Book of Martyrs’, this massive and repeatedly expanded compilation became one of the cornerstones of English Protestant identity, a potent reminder of the militant character of the English Reformation."

After swelling to a monstrous size, the book was edited down by 1700 into an even more sensational treatise on the evils of Popery, luridly illustrated folios being preserved in England's churches in order to convince the English people of the evils of Catholicism.

Foxe reveals a huge amount of important stuff and is invaluable as a carefully-controlled source for sixteenth-century England. The thing is though, that he's far from impartial in his melodramatic accounts, he does his best to gloss over the fact that the persecutions were -- bizarrely and appallingly to our eyes -- anything but unpopular, he exaggerates the presence of weeping crowds crying in sympathy at the public executions, he plays down the extraordinary extent to which the persecuting authorities sought to persuade rather than convict most Protestants, he eagerly repeats obviously biased and unsubstantiated claims, and he conspicuously omits the martyrdoms of those he presumably felt deserved execution for their beliefs. 

He also egregiously passes over inconvenient facts like Ridley having supported Jane Grey and preached from the pulpit that both Mary and Elizabeth were bastards who were not entitled to inherit the throne, or that Latimer's hands weren't entirely free from the ashes of burnt heretics.

For all that, Foxe reveals a lot incidentally and despite his his own intentions, his work inadvertently demonstrating that popular support for the martyrs was often limited, and that the authorities frequently went to extraordinary lengths to try to save prisoners from the flames. Leaving aside the cynical fact that a repentant heretic was far more valuable than a defiant dead one, from their point of view, the Catholic persecutors were desperate to avoid condemning Protestants to death, as they believed that if they executed unrepentant heretics, they were effectively condemning them to eternal fire. 

If Mary and Pole hadn't died so soon...

Seemingly Mary received a rapturous welcome when she became Queen -- over opposition from the likes of Ridley -- in July 1553. More than 800 wealthy Protestants -- including Foxe -- fled England, and the Duke of Northumberland recanted his opposition to the Catholic Church after his rebellion was swiftly quashed, spontanteously admitting at the scaffold that his own Protestantism had been an opportunistic sham, motivated by ambition and greed. As early as 1554 it was a standard lament among the Protestants who had fled that the English people and clergy at large had returned to Catholicism, even in the parts of the country where Protestantism had been strongest. 

It doesn't take much to see pointers to the extent to which Mary's reign had returned England to Catholicism. Ten of the 23 bishops she'd inherited from her brother returned to unity with the Catholic Church, and after her death all bar one of her bishops rejected the Elizabethan settlement. More than two thirds of Edward's clergy returned to unity with the Catholic Church under Mary, and while much of this was surely down to simple opportunism, it's telling that many of them retained that allegiance after Mary's death. Indeed, even at the lowest levels of the clergy this was the case. Eamon Duffy, in Fires of Faith: Catholic England under Mary Tudor says it was possible in 1561 to walk from the Surrey border to the Sussex coast, crossing sixteen parishes in every one of which the incumbent had either died of influenza or been deprived of office for refusing to conform to the Elizabethan settlement.

Fires of Faith...

Contrary to popular misconceptions, largely rooted in Foxe's myth-making, Mary's reign was a golden age of Catholic preaching, publishing, and polemical argument, but unfortunately the whole period is unforgiveably tainted by Mary's persecutions of Protestants: more than 280 Protestant men and women were executed in just under four years, from February 1555 to November 1558, the most intense religious persecution of its kind anywhere in sixteenth-century Europe, an era when religious persecution was the done thing. 

Most people back then -- Catholics and Protestants alike -- believed that though regrettable it was sometimes necessary to execute people for their religious views. They believed heresy was worse than sin, that it begat sins and by causing people to sin, led to their damnation. Our eternal souls were at stake, and desperate action had to be taken to stem the heretical tide. It was this attitude that drove Mary I in her campaign against Protestants, and drove Elizabeth I in hers against Catholics.

If I can quote Duffy's Fires of Faith on this one:

"Religious persecution remained a viable government option, frequently resorted to all over Europe, well into the seventeenth century. Nor were barbaric forms of execution going out of fashion, least of all in England. Elizabeth I burned no Catholics, but she strangled, disembowelled, and dismembered more than 200. I should not myself care to allocate marks for brutality between these different methods of slow killing."

And that's not to get into those who were imprisoned or exiled, or the thousands who were slain in the suppression of Catholic revolts such as the Northern rebellion and the first Desmond rebellion, both of which took place in 1569, and the second Desmond rebellion of 1579-1583. Most of those who were executed under Elizabeth were nominally executed for treason, not for heresy, but one cannot really distinguish between the two in the sixteenth century: from the viewpoint of whoever was doing the persecuting, and given the whole question of supremacy, treason and heresy were often synonymous.

The burnings constitute an indelible stain on Mary's reign, and rightly so, but it's about time people started to get their heads around the fact that 'Bloody Mary' was nowhere near as murderous than 'Good Queen Bess'.

The Pearl of York...

In summarising the horrible ways in which Elizabeth had Catholics executed, I'm not sure why Duffy leaves out crushing, that having been the standard Elizabethan punishment for those who refused to plead their case. 

In 1586, for instance, St Margaret Clitherow, a 29-year-old butcher's wife who had converted to Catholicism a dozen or so years earlier, was arrested in York for the crime of having harboured Catholic priests -- a crime, in Elizabethan England, but one that Catholics were driven to, as without priests we cannot have Mass, cannot celebrate the Eucharist in remembrance of him, and share in that sacrament which is the source and summit of Christian life. A mother of three, Margaret refused to plead her case, as doing so would have meant that her children would have been made to testify, and would themselves probably have been tortured.

And so, rather than being tried for harbouring priests, she was executed for her silence. On the morning of Good Friday 1586 she was taken to the tollbooth at York's Ouse Bridge and was stripped naked. A handkerchief was tied across her face, and she was laid down with a sharp rock the size of a man's fist under her spine. A door was placed upon her, and rocks and stones were piled upon this, so that her spine broke and she was crushed to death. 

It took fifteen minutes for her to die.

Her broken carcass was left there for six hours.

Blood begets Blood...

One of Margaret's neighbours was a sixteen-year-old youth named Guy Fawkes who'd been baptised into the Church of England, but had become Catholic as a boy. His mother moved from York to Scotton, roughly thirty miles away, a year or so later.

Nineteen years after Margaret's martyrdom, Guy Fawkes was tortured to reveal his part in a murdeous conspiracy to blow up Parliament and kill King James I, who was hated by Britain's persecuted Catholics over his failure to remove from the Church's throat the State boot Elizabeth had planted there so firmly. Fawkes was sentenced to be hung, drawn, and quartered. 

And tonight people will light bonfires and set off fireworks to celebrate this.

Things, as you'd expect, got even worse for Catholics after the Gunpowder Plot. Shortly afterwards, parliament passed the Popish Recusants Act 1605, pressing the boot down further by -- for example -- barring Catholics from acting as legal guardians or practicing law or medicine, and mandating the receipt of Anglican communion. In 1613 there was even an unsuccessful attempt in Parliament to introduce a law to compel Catholics to wear a red hat, or coloured stockings, just so they'd be immediately identifiable. Legislated oppression against Catholics continued in all manner of ways until Robert Peel and Ireland's own Duke of Wellington gave way to popular pressure led by the Liberator himself, Daniel O'Connell, and pushed through the Catholic Relief Act of 1829. 

Even now, Catholics are technically third-class citizens in Britain, the only people specifically barred in law from even marrying someone who's in the line of succession to the throne. I'm okay with this, though; sure, it's unfair, but it doesn't make that much difference to Catholics' lives in reality. I doubt there are many Catholic schoolgirls who've been heartbroken by the prospect of having to choose between, say, Prince Harry and the Mass.

The bottom line for me is that I don't think we should be pulling threads out of the British Constitution to make a cosmetic change so that Catholics can feel better when in practice we have exactly the same rights as everybody else in Britain.

Things are okay now. The State doesn't approve of us, but it tolerates us. That's good enough, though there are signs that the tide is turning, and I just worry, at times, that that tolerance may ebb, as other groups, historically less oppressed than Britain's Catholics, demand not merely tolerance, but approval. 

But then, people who point this out tend to be misrepresented and barracked as bigots. Strange times. 

Motorway Musings: Two Cultures and Traditional Halls

"We make our friends; we make our enemies; but God makes our next-door neighbour," wrote G.K. Chesterton in his 1905 book Heretics. In a chapter entitled 'On Certain Modern Writers and the Institution of the Family', cited approvingly by Stephen Fry's eponymous character in 1992's Peter's Friends, Chesterton points out how city life can have the paradoxical effect of narrowing our minds:

"It is not fashionable to say much nowadays of the advantages of the small community. We are told that we must go in for large empires and large ideas. There is one advantage, however, in the small state, the city, or the village, which only the wilfully blind can overlook. The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world. He knows much more of the fierce varieties and uncompromising divergences of men. The reason is obvious. In a large community we can choose our companions. In a small community our companions are chosen for us… 

There is nothing really narrow about the clan; the thing which is really narrow is the clique.  

The men of the clan live together because they all wear the same tartan or are all descended from the same sacred cow; but in their souls, by the divine luck of things, there will always be more colours than in any tartan. But the men of the clique live together because they have the same kind of soul, and their narrowness is a narrowness of spiritual coherence and contentment, like that which exists in hell.”

I was thinking about this on the bus the other day, pondering differences between Ireland's and England's educational systems, and scientism, and the roads that lie before us. 

A Lesson Learnt Before a Sun-burning Day on a Crowded Black Beach

Many years ago, chatting to two smart and wonderful English girls in a Roman underground station I was struck by how, though they were clearly rather better versed in matters scientific than me, they seemed to lack the most basic knowledge of their own country's history or literature. 

Since moving to England, I’ve noticed this phenomenon time and again, as intelligent people with scientific or technical training all too often seemed to subsist on caricatures of history, geography, literature, and philosophy, while equally smart people educated in the humanities look embarrassed when their absolute ignorance of matters scientific is brought to light; some just shrug, and say they're not good with numbers.

That’s not to say that this phenomenon is alien to Ireland, but I’ve long found it to be far more pronounced in England. If Philip Larkin was right in saying that educated people should know three things – what words mean, where places are and when things happened – it rather looked as though there was something amiss with English education.

It doesn't really take a genius to see what's going wrong. English education tends towards early specialisation, such that first year history students – for example – in English universities generally tend to be slightly better than their Irish counterparts. I've known people to study three humanities A-Levels, and others to do four scientific ones. There's much to be said for this, of course, but specialisation has a price, and that price is all too often a rounded education.

In contrast, Irish students tend to study a range of subjects. People who start science degrees with Leaving Cert maths, physics, chemistry, and biology in the bag will also usually have studied English, Irish, and French or German. Those who start arts degrees with English, history, geography, and a couple of languages in their pocket will also have done maths and quite probably a science subject. And, of course, they'll all have done a whole medley of subjects right up to their Junior Cert.

Sometimes this knowledge can be pretty shallow, of course, but still, there's some sort of balance there, an attempt to educate children in a general way.

The more focused English system seems to lend itself far more than the Irish one to people seeing themselves as 'science people' or 'arts people'. It's as though the arts ones have persuaded themselves that they simply can't do science or handle numbers, and faced with this cowering ignorance, the science ones have become convinced that their type of knowledge is the only type that’s reliable.

People do make up lost ground as they get older, but too many years in the English education system have convinced me that though there are loads of well-rounded English people, intellectually speaking, they're seriously outnumbered by those at the extremes.

I remember being surprised and impressed back in the day to meet undergraduates who'd managed a mixture of science subjects and humanities in their A-Levels. They seemed a gloomily rare breed.

(I'd like to see the figures on this, of course, as my impressions might well be deeply unrepresentative, but still,  that's how it seems to me. And, well, I was on a bus while pondering this, so please forgive my broad-brush approach here. I don't know how many spreadsheets I could have summoned on my phone through a ropey connection.)

Two Cultures

The current fashion for popular science books, and the elevation of reasonably articulate scientists to the status of public gurus are clear symptoms of this; it’s as though the arts people feel inadequate, but lacking the skills and experience to educate themselves about science, they settle for trusting those they see as better informed than themselves. And of course, without suitable training and extensive reading, they're hardly equipped to establish just how credible certain scientists are. They all seem impressive, talking about things largely alien to the innocent arts people...

It's hardly surprising then there are no shortage of science people who'll look down on their arts counterparts, given how much ground has been surrendered.

And contemporary information fetishes – without an appreciation of the skills needed to interpret that information – don't help in the slightest. Insofar as there are celebrity historians to rival the science gurus, people can think of them as mere fact-bearers, not really getting that history's as much about approaching, sifting, handling, and contextualising facts as it is about simply finding them out. The facts don't speak for themselves, after all. History and science aren't just about knowing things: they're about thinking historically and about thinking scientifically.

Things haven’t really improved since C.P. Snow banged on about the Two Cultures in 1959. Establishment Britain’s still ruled by those from humanities backgrounds – not one senior government minister has a third-level science qualification – but in terms of popular culture it’s as though things have swung from one unhealthy extreme to another. 

In 1967, G.R. Elton was able to say with a straight face that “Modern civilization […] rests upon the two intellectual pillars of natural science and analytical history,” but a lazy scientism is in the ascendant now; in a world where Oxford dons can describe philosophy as “a complete waste of time” we run the risk of kicking away the philosophical and theological foundations of both pillars, and smashing the historical one into rubble.

Threads Plucked from the Tapestry of our Common Culture

All of which leaves me depressed at the way that high university fees seem to be increasingly driving English students to try to study close to home rather than – as was often the way – as far from home as they could possibly get. 

The system of university halls of residence – especially traditional ones, modelled on Oxbridge colleges – has long struck me as one of the very best features of English education, its real value being in how it forced all sort of students to live side by side, and to learn from each other. It’s an arrangement that mitigates to some degree the English tendency towards a fragmented intellectual culture.

Hall life isn’t always smooth, but there’s something to be said for a system where people of different backgrounds, different worldviews, different interests are simply forced to get on with each other. It’s normal in halls to see people who might identify themselves as Christians, socialists, Muslims, liberals, Thatcherites, Scots, environmentalists, Jews, scientists, vegetarians, lesbians, Buddhists, northerners, communists, Hindus, atheists, nationalists, Arsenal fans, and all manner of other ways sitting down to dinner with each other, and talking into the night about what they have in common and where they differ.

  

That’s not to say that birds of a feather don’t tend to flock together, but in the confines of halls, people just have to get on. Students rarely have the option of sealing themselves off into like-minded cliques, and so firm friendships form between historians, microbiologists, linguists, psychologists, medical physicists, economists, oncologists, political scientists, embryologists, anthropologists. engineers, lawyers, physical chemists, theologians, botanists, philosophers, mathematicians… and do so across cultural, religious, and political divides.

I was lucky enough to live in halls for years, and think there’s a lot to be said for the kind of place that enables and promotes such interdisciplinary mingling; it’s a shame that it doesn’t happen more often, and it disheartens me that the more students stay at home, the fewer students will gain from the deep and diverse friendships that can be forged in traditional halls. The bridge that joins Britain's two cultures seems increasingly frail, and each brick that falls away weakens it further, impoverishing us all.

Or so I thought while slowly making my way up the M6 on Tuesday.

Tricks of the Mind: Thoughts on Derren Brown

Having recently had it recommended to me by a friend, I've been reading Derren Brown's Tricks of the Mind; I've had it for ages, but it's been gathering dust ever since I bought it as part of a "4 Books for £1" deal at a local charity shop, the kind of arrangement that exacts a higher toll on one's bookshelves than one's wallet. 

Brown's enthralling on the stuff he knows about, but unfortunately I had to wade through a feeble and derivative "why Christianity is rubbish" section before getting to the good stuff. The book proper, after the Preface, begins as follows:

"The Bible is not history. 

Coming to terms with this fact was a fiddly one for me, because I believed in God, Jesus and Satan (ish). And one aspect of believing in those things and meeting once a week with like-minded people is that you're never encouraged to really study the facts and challenge your own beliefs. I always imagined that challenging my beliefs might make them stronger."

That the Bible, crudely put, is not history, is hardly an earth-shaking statement. If Brown found it so, this probably reflects more on him than on the Bible, Christianity, or Judaism. While the Bible has a profound unity, it is also, in a somewhat banal sense, a library, and a library that contains all manner of literary forms and genres, only some of which claim to be relating what happened when, if that's what Brown means by 'history'.

This may have been Derren's experience; it certainly wasn't mine

I find it odd that Brown seems to think that Christians are never expected to study facts and challenge their beliefs; this certainly hasn't been my own experience, but it may be a fair reflection of Brown's own background, from which he seems to be generalising. Brown describes his religious background as follows: 

"Picture, if you require a good vomiting, a whole herd of us being encouraged to display the Pentecostal gift of 'talking in tongues' by a self-styled pastor, with the proviso that if we ceased babbling because we thought it silly then that was indeed the Devil telling us to stop. Envision, as a secondary emetic, me telling a non-Christian friend that I would pray for him, unaware of how unspeakably patronizing such an offer might sound. I would delight in being offended, and puff up with pride at being outspoken and principled. And this the result of a childhood indoctrination followed by years of circular belief to support it."

Brown, then, was a Pentecostal Evangelical in his late teens. Although I've never attended a specifically Pentecostal church, I used to go along to Manchester's main Evangelical Anglican one on Sunday evenings in order to get a serious handle on what my friends believed and why. One thing that I really got from attending there was a feeling of texture -- people believed all manner of things within the Christian matrix, and did so for all sorts of reasons. Some were incredibly curious, while others were incredibly credulous; some were deeply well-read, and some weren't well-read at all; some made a point of testing their faith by reading things and engaging with people who contradicted and opposed them, and others stayed in their own bubbles. 

I would be surprised if Brown's Pentecostal friends were radically different from my Evangelical ones in terms of their variety; indeed, it seems to me that such variety is typical for members of any belief group, given how I've seen the same range among Catholic and Atheist friends.

This looks like a man trying to rationalise a wish to walk away...

Brown, anyway, says that his road away from Christianity began when he saw a hypnotist while he was at university in the early 1990s -- he graduated from Bristol, where he'd studied law and German, in 1992. He describes how the hypnotist inspired him to find out more about mind control and other tricks, and to take up hypnotism himself, much to dismay of Christians friends, members of the university's Christian Union, and the congregation of the main student church in Bristol. This in turn led him to start wondering why people believe in the paranormal, which he says led him to ask certain questions...

Well, so he says. He also says that he'd not been to church with any regularity for a couple of years when he started down this road, which does rather lead one to think that he probably hadn't been all that serious about his faith before that point; indeed, it looks as though he must have stopped regular practice pretty soon after starting university, which makes this whole story look like a rationalisation after the fact. 

I mean, if he'd been as committed a Christian as he claims he'd been, why stop regular worship? It's not as if community isn't an important part of Christianity, after all. He was an Evangelical, remember; they tend not just to do Sunday worship, but also have house groups, and student Bible study groups, and debates, and talks, and all manner of things. It seems as though he'd never seriously engaged with any variety of Christianity as an adult, and had been drifting away from his faith long before he started dabbling in hypnotism and conjuring tricks.

A fair point, but not one he was unique in stumbling upon...

Still. He says that he started to think about the paranormal, and to read up on it, and says:

"What struck me about the people I knew who did believe in the paranormal was that they clearly had a circular belief system. Essentially, one believes X so strongly that all evidence that does not support X is ignored, and all events that fit in with X are noticed and amplified...  

The more I came up against this sort of thing, the more I became concerned that I, as a Christian, was falling into exactly the same trap. Was I not indulging the same sort of circular belief? Remembering prayers that had been answered, and forgetting those that weren't? Or deciding that they had been answered but in a less obvious way? What separated my belief from the equally firm convictions of my psychic friend, other than the fact that hers were less mainstream and therefore easier to poke fun at? Weren't we both guilty of the same comforting nonsense? Surely I was being a hypocrite. 

It's a question I still ask of intelligent Christians, because I would dearly like to hear a well-formed answer."

Confirmation bias is, of course, a huge problem, and it's a problem that goes rather beyond belief in God, the efficacy of prayer, and psychic healing. Far too often I've seen historians and others scholars cherry-pick their evidence, and Fern Elsdon-Baker's The Selfish Genius: How Richard Dawkins Rewrote Darwin's Legacy, which I've recently read, details the tendency of contemporary pop-science books to focus on evolution from a zoological angle, without considering the rather challenging discoveries from the fields of botany and microbiology. Lawyers, of course, cherry-pick all the time, because advocacy is a very different thing from honest scholarship, which requires us to account for all the facts, however inconvenient.

So yes, this is a problem, especially in connection with prayer. It's why I get uneasy when people talk of keeping prayer diaries, in which they record their prayers and how they were answered, and with experiments where large numbers of people try to pray away illnesses or nonsense like that. Petitionary prayer is just one type of prayer, and few serious Christians think it's as simple as "having our prayers answered". Christians are expected to do it, of course, but it seems that our doing so is more about bringing us into harmony with God -- "not my will but thine" -- than about bringing God into harmony with us; he's a person, after all, not a machine, and he works, as they say, in mysterious ways.

C.S. Lewis put it well in his 1959 essay 'The Efficacy of Prayer', saying "The very question 'Does prayer work?' puts us in the wrong frame of mind from the outset. 'Work': as if it were magic, or a machine—something that functions automatically."

It can seem lazy to bring up C.S. Lewis in these discussions, as Lewis, sadly, has almost become a cliche in the popular mind, but he is very popular in the Evangelical circles in which Brown once mixed, so I'd be curious to know whether Brown ever attempted to engage with his work. I'd be very surprised if he hadn't been confronted with it at some point. Lewis gave a lot of time to thinking about petitionary prayer, tackling it in a number of essays and perhaps most memorably in his posthumously-published Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer. He might not provide Brown with the answers he'd want, but I'm pretty sure he'd at least reassure him that intelligent Christians do at least try to grapple honestly with this aspect of their faith.

One of the great Dawkbot Tropes...

Anyway, Brown says that in order to avoid this self-directed charge of hypocrisy, he decided he'd start looking at the outside evidence:

"It's actually rather straightforward to do this with Christianity, although the believer is not usually encouraged to do so by his peers or pastors. 

Not only is the believer encouraged not to question or challenge his faith, but, to use Richard Dawkins' apt expression, any rational inquiry is expected to 'tip-toe respectfully away' one religion enters the room. It is dangerous to question from within, and rude to question from without. We are allowed to question people about their politics or ethics and expect them to defend their beliefs, or at least hold their own in any other important matter by recourse to evidence, yet somehow on the massive subject of God and how he might have us behave, all rational discussion must stop the moment we hear 'I believe'."

This may have been Brown's experience, but it's certainly not been mine; time and again I've heard atheists challenging Christians about their faith, and I used to do so myself when I was an an atheist, before I grew out of such adolescent nonsense after doing a lot of reading, thinking, and arguing. 

This, frankly, is a Dawkinsesque trope, and one which I've simply never seen borne out by my own experience, whether as an atheist, a reluctant and uncommitted Catholic, or a convinced practicing one. I've asked loads of other Christians about this too, and like me they say it doesn't tally with their experiences at all. And it won't do to say that well, maybe Christians can be challenged, but other religions can't; I've attended pretty robust debates with Muslims and Jews too. 

There are times when it's inappropriate to challenge people about their beliefs -- at funerals, say -- but that's just good manners. In the main, this is something we can and do talk about. Indeed, there's a bit in 1 Peter which says that Christians should always be prepared to explain why they believe the things they do, and should be willing to do this with gentleness and reverence.

I suspect that Brown, like Professor Dawkins, has fallen victim to some confirmation bias himself on this one.

As for not questioning or challenging our faith, I think the old "test everything; hold to what is true" rather puts paid to that nonsense. This may have been Brown's experience, but it's rot to assume that this is the general rule. Look at Thomas's Summa Theologica; it grapples with pretty much every argument against religious belief that there is, and does so honestly and seriously. Yes, I know Richard Dawkins dismisses it on the basis of a handful of misrepresented pages, but it's pretty clear that Dawkins didn't understand those pages or read much beyond them. I'd call Dawkins' handling of Aquinas intellectually dishonest, but that'd be to do a disservice to dishonesty.

The heart of the matter...

After pausing to misrepresent the normal way in which religious believers in the Abrahamic tradition have always interpreted their texts, Brown eventually reaches the nub of his argument, saying:

"To me and my erstwhile fellow Christians, it all rested on whether or not Christ really came back from really being dead. If he was actually resurrected as it says in the Bible, then it's all true, regardless of what one thinks of Christians and their behaviour. If he didn't, then it's all nonsense, and Christianity is a delusion."

I think this is a bit simplistic, but yes, this is broadly right: "if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain," as Paul says. And as Timothy Radcliffe puts it, building on that, "if our faith is true, it is the most important thing in the world, and if it’s not true, why are we here?"

Brown says, rightly, that the burden of proof for this lies on the Christians who claim it, and that to their credit, Christians generally try to tackle this head on; he sketchily outlines a couple of arguments in favour of the Resurrection, saying that there are plenty more, but that all these arguments depend on our taking the New Testament stories as accounts of real events, and that there is a "vast amount of impartial biblical research" that shows that the Bible is not history. 

And it was at about this point that I decided that facepalming and headdesking were worthwhile practices, not least because the examples of arguments used by Brown relate, basically, to Jesus' tomb being empty, about which Michael Grant rightly says in Jesus: An Historian's Review of the Gospels: "But if we apply the same sort of criteria that we would apply to any other literary sources, then the evidence is firm and plausible enough to necessitate the conclusion that the tomb was indeed found empty."

This is the kind of area where honest and intelligent sceptics need to grapple with Raymond Brown's Death of the Messiah and perhaps even more importantly N.T. Wright's The Resurrection of the Son of God, which among other things demonstrates just how bizarre it was for a bunch of first-century Jewish fishermen to have gone around claiming that their friend had risen from the dead and was in fact God.

It all depend on looking at things properly...
So, going though Brown's claims sentence by sentence...

"We cannot value personal conviction when we are looking at to what extent the story stands up as fact. Such things must be put to one side; only evidence must be of interest."

Agreed. So when approaching the New Testament documents, and other roughly contemporaneous material, as historians we have to put aside our theological and philosophical preconceptions and convictions. If we start reading the texts in the assumption that Jesus was God -- or indeed that God certainly exists -- then we basically prejudge the texts to be accurate; likewise, if we start with the assumption that Jesus was not God -- or indeed that God doesn't exist, miracles don't happen, and there's nothing to the world other than matter and energy -- then we prejudge the evidence as inaccurate and false. 

Neither approach is honest or scholarly; given the scientific impossibility of proving the non-existence of God, the only intellectually honest starting position for a historian in looking at the Biblical texts is agnosticism. 

Of course, scholars should make up their minds, and will then do further work and interpret things in line with decisions they've made based on the evidence, but they should always be open to the possibility that they're wrong and be willing to revise their views in the light of new evidence or questions, arguments, and interpretations they'd never previously considered.

Oh! Schoolboy error!

"And the evidence shows very clearly that the stories of the New Testament were written in the first couple of hundred years after the historical Jesus died."

This is about as inaccurate as you're going to get. The stories of the New Testament, as Brown would describe then, can be found in developed forms in the four Gospels and Acts, as well as occasionally creedal statements and references to the Crucifixion and Resurrection in some Pauline letters. Said Pauline letters were written between 50 and the mid-60s AD, while it's recognised by all serious Biblical scholars that John, the last of the canonical Gospels to have been written, was complete by 100 AD; indeed, there's a fragment of it in Manchester's John Rylands Library which dates to about 125AD. 

Acts is likewise generally thought to have been written by the same date, for a variety of reasons. I happen to think it was probably written rather earlier than that, such that Luke and Acts were substantially as we have them by the mid-60s AD, but what's clear is that credible scholars see the New Testament narratives as First Century documents.

In other words, the stories of the New Testament were certainly written in the first seventy years after the historical Jesus died. They may even have been written, in some cases, in the first thirty to thirty-five years after the historical Jesus died. They were all written by 100 AD, and probably rather earlier. They were not written in 230 AD.

Another schoolboy error! Outrageous!

"These stories then continued to be edited and revised for political and social needs for much of the first millennium."

Sorry, but no, they didn't, Dan Brown fantasies aside. We have thousands of manuscripts -- whether intact, substantial, or merely fragmentary -- of the New Testament documents from the medieval and classical periods, and what's remarkable about them is how consistent they are. There are loads of minor differences, usually due to scribal error or abbreviations etc, but the textual critics have done quite a job with them. 

The New Testament documents, as we now have them, are almost certainly -- the odd punctuation mark aside -- as they would have been in the First Century, and that's not radically different from how they were when the Normans did their thing at Hastings.

Better, but still not quite true...

"Jesus was one of many teachers at a time of massive social upheaval and tension, and inasmuch as one can separate his words from those later put into his mouth, he taught a mix of a much-needed social vision ('The Kingdom of Heaven') and personal stoicism."

Personal stoicism? It makes very little sense to interpret Jesus as a Stoic, a Cynic, or an Epicurean; as John P. Meier keeps hammering home in A Marginal Jew, Jesus was Jewish, and his teaching needs to be understood in that context. Brown, tellingly, betrays no familiarity with this idea. 

At the back of the book, Brown says that he read Burton Mack's Who Wrote the New Testament? The Making of the Christian Myth, as a half-believer and finished with his belief in tatters, but this merely shows the need to read widely; Mack, who saw Jesus as pretty close to a Cynic, is very much on the fringes of New Testament scholarship in his conviction that Jesus is best understood as a kind of Hellenistic philosopher. 

As for social upheaval and tension, well, I wouldn't be so sure. The Roman senator and historian Tacitus, after all, in a potted summary of Judaean history, writes of first-century Judaea that, "In Tiberius' reign all was quiet" (Histories 5.9). Tiberius reigned from 14 to 37 AD, so was emperor during while Jesus was preaching and when he was executed. That's not to say that things weren't extremely messy before and after Tiberius' reign, but generally it seems that Jesus' lifetime was reasonably peaceful -- if not necessarily happy -- in his neck of the woods.

Serious conflation here, Derren

"After he died, and after the Kingdom of Heaven hadn't arrived, his followers formed communities that were persecuted or ridiculed; they needed stories and legends to inspire them and give them credence."

Brown's conflating stuff here, unfortunately. It is widely believed that early Christians expected the Kingdom of Heaven -- in an eschatological sense, rather than an ecclesiastical or Christological one -- to come fairly soon after the Resurrection, but it's clear that they didn't expect it to come immediately afterwards. Rather, they seem to have expected it to come within their own lifetimes, and only took to writing down the stories they told when it became clear that this might not be on the cards!

Sticking to the central story of Christianity -- the Crucifixion and Resurrection -- it's significant that the earliest New Testament book to have been written, 1 Thessalonians, which was written about 50AD, speaks of Jesus having been executed and raised to life, and also addresses the reality that Christians had died and that more would die before Jesus would come again. 

One of the key things we need to remember when reading the Pauline letters is that they were written for the benefit of people who were already Christians, and who were already familiar with the story of Jesus, so these references, within twenty years of the Crucifixion, shouldn't be understood as things Paul made up around 50AD. They were already believed.

Just as interesting is the passage at 1 Corinthians 15, where Paul says:

"For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brethren at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me."

This passage, though written in the mid-50s, clearly reflects a rather earlier tradition; indeed, it's almost a truism among Biblical scholars that the first sentence here -- if not the second too -- is a creedal statement, that is, it was a statement of belief that Paul received in the mid-30s, when he himself became a Christian, having previously persecuted them.

In other words, if the early Christians made up this stuff, they did it very quickly, pretty much immediately after Jesus' death. And this, of course, invites the question of why they would have done such a thing. How do we explain the early Church, as testified to by Tacitus, Suetonius, Josephus, and others, if we're to dismiss the idea of the Resurrection?

So speaks a man who's clearly not read much ancient history

"So they created them: as was customary, words and actions that fitted present needs were put into the mouths and lives of historical figures and then read as history."

As was customary? Well, yes, this used to happen in ancient historical writing, but it took time: Livy put speeches into the mouths of Roman generals from hundreds of years before his day, speeches that probably tells us rather more about Augustan Rome than the Middle Republic, but this was centuries later, when said historical figures were shadows from the distant past; Herodotus had done the same thing, and it's clear that many of the taller tales he told had an aetiological purpose, a Kiplingesque function to explain things in his own day with reference to events long before he had lived; even speeches attributed by Tacitus to British chieftains decades earlier are clearly things he'd thought they would have said, poetic truths deployed artistically because he had no way of knowing what could have been said.

Not all ancient writers were like this, however, and it's ludicrous and flatly ahistorical to describe this sort of thing as 'customary': Thucydides and Polybius, for instance, make it clear that they tried to be as accurate as possible, especially with reference to things they could check. 

The Evangelists clearly had evangelistic rather than historical aims in writing their work, but they wrote close enough to the events they described to be able to check a fair amount of it, even if they weren't eyewitnesses to said events. Indeed, given that the earliest versions of the story of Jesus were extant in the immediate aftermath of his death, it's clear that there would have been been plenty of people around who could have criticised and contradicted any attempts to attribute words and deeds to Jesus fallaciously.

That's not to say that individual little details couldn't have been attributed to him, but the core structure facts of the story can hardly have been cooked up quickly, and we know they were in place in the mid-30s.

Myth-making takes time, that's the problem

"Inspiring figures were enormously bent, stretched and rewritten so that their 'lives' would fit what they had come to stand for."

Yes, this happened all the time in the ancient world, but again, it took time. It didn't happen quickly. This seems to be the main problem for Brown: he's convinced the Christian story took much longer to take form that it did, and given that he thinks it was developed over centuries, he's all too ready to believe that it was similar to, I dunno, Plutarch's Life of Lycurgus. This'd be a fair thing to think if the Gospels were late and consciously ahistorical texts like the Gnostic Gospels, but they were all written early, and clearly based on earlier -- and essentially stable -- traditions.

Communities, not committees, and in a traditional of oral teaching

"Although the Gospels are attributed to individuals, they were written largely by communities."

There's some truth to this; although the conventional attributions of the Gospels to their traditional authors can be dated to the early Second Century, it's clear that the Gospels arose within communities and surely reflected the cultures and concerns of those communities. This, however, is hardly grounds for discarding them as historically valueless.  

Michael Grant, to quote him again, says that, "Like Paul, the Evangelists depended to some extent upon eyewitnesses (or their children) and upon the handing down of tradition from person to person. For oral teaching, which required elaborate memorizing, was very highly developed among the Jews; and so the Gospels, too, were largely built up by oral transmission. As time went on the individual items of information (pericopae) which had thus been transmitted were moulded together into somewhat larger units for purposes of worship in the emerging churches."

We, of course, have no tradition of oral teaching, so it won't do to compare modern games of 'Chinese whispers' with ancient oral traditions. 

The different Gospels seem to have been written in different ways.

• Mark is the most primitive, and seems in some sense to have been the simple combination of a passion narrative with an account of Jesus' teaching; it's very plausible that it arose almost naturally within a community, but given how there's no consensus on where that community might have been, it seems foolhardy to describe it as the product of one.

• I strongly suspect that Matthew is an early Greek reworking of an Aramaic original, or at least a recomposition of Mark in light of other traditions some of which may have been in Aramaic and attributed to Matthew -- who if the text is trustworthy may well have been literate and competent at a form of shorthand -- but in any case, the mainstream scholarly position is that Matthew was written by a noneyewitness who depended on other sources, at least two of which were written; the vast majority of scholars believe that its author was a Jewish Christian, with most thinking he wrote in Syria, probably Antioch.

• Luke is presented, along with Acts, as the work of an individual, and there is no good evidence to suggest otherwise. The author of Luke speaks of several others having written accounts of Jesus' life before him, and puts forward his work as a systematic synthesis of these; certainly, he seems to have drawn extensively on Mark and also at least two other sources.

• John is something of a mystery, and its authorship has long puzzled people, with scholarship having varied over the years from seeing it as the work of a eyewitness to nothing of the sort, and seeing it as the most historical Gospel to the least historical one. Views vary wildly, with the one thing that's clear being that it's very different to the other three Gospels. It looks, on balance, to have arisen in a  different context to the other three Gospels, and to have been, ultimately, the work of two authors: one who wrote most of it, and then an editor from the same Christian community who added in a couple of extra passages, notably the conclusion. More than any of the other Gospels it can be described as the work of a community, but even then it was hardly the work of a committee; rather, it reflects the beliefs of the community in which it arose.

The core facts are remarkably stable, and there's no trace of them ever being otherwise

"Great and powerful stories were told, changed and rearranged over several generations."

Expressed in this way, this is massively simplistic. It seems, rather, that there were three stages in how the Gospels came to be composed: the earliest stage was that of simple memory, with people telling the stories based on what they'd seen or heard -- and we know this was happening in the mid-30s, when Paul met Peter etc; a stage when memories bedded down and were reflected upon, taking on colour with details being picked out based on the experiences and thoughts of the communities in which the tales were told; and finally a writing stage, where the traditions were shaped into written Gospels, which may in turn have been tweaked somewhat in light of the beliefs and experiences of the communities in which they arose.

This needn't have taken nearly as long as Brown seems to think; as I've said, I think there's a strong case for Mark and Luke being written by the mid-60s, with perhaps Matthew in the 70s and John by 90; in any case, scholarly orthodoxy has all four Gospels done and dusted by 100 AD. 

Luke clearly drew on Mark, but didn't rearrange the earlier Gospel so much as elaborate on it, adding to it somewhat. Matthew evidently drew on Mark too, and seems to have shared a second source, a collection of Jesus' sayings -- usually referred to as Q -- with Luke, probably rearranging his Q material somewhat in order to create five coherent sermons or discourses. Significantly, though, this isn't a manipulation of facts so much as an rearranging of sayings so as to give Jesus' teachings a more clear shape and to ease understanding. 

The basic structure facts stay the same across the Gospels. The Gospels may not be history, but they're historically invaluable. They're not just 'tales'.

It's not enough to know yourself; you must know your enemy too...
Brown says he has a layman's interest in this sort of scholarship, which is laudible if unconvincing; his understanding of this sort of stuff seems profoundly shallow, such that his atheism seems no more deeply-rooted than his faith had once been.  It seems to me, instead, as though he just swallows up things that support what he wants to believe.

His promotion of Richard Dawkins' ignorant The God Delusion as his favourite book, a "very important defence of atheism" which "systematically looks at every aspect of faith and 'proofs' of God's existence" is testimony to this, really. I happen to think Dawkins' book is important, simply because it's the highest profile modern rant against religion, and that as such it's good for Christians to read it, but that they shouldn't stop there; they should check what Dawkins says, and consider arguments against at every stage, just as they should with things they might be more inclined to believe.

As Mr Keating says in Dead Poets' Society, "When you read, don't just consider what the author thinks, consider what you think!"

My copy, for instance, has been read and reread, pondered and annotated to a point where the margins are blue with observations and cross-references. It is, frankly, an extraordinarily shoddy book, one that misrepresents Christianity and religious belief in general time and time again. Not that this is surprising: atheism, as Jonathan Sacks has said, deserves better than the New Atheists.

Like I've said, the bulk of Brown's book is fascinating. Well-written, informative, and witty, I'd definitely recommend it to anyone who wants to know about memory, suggestibility, unconscious communication, distraction, confirmation bias, and all manner of other wonderful things. It's just a shame it's marred by such an ignorant and misleading opening chapter.

The Scourge of Abuse: Time to Face Facts

Exposure: The Other Side of Jimmy, shown on ITV last Wednesday, will have horrified those for whom Jimmy Savile was a broadcasting institution. 

The programme alleged that the DJ and presenter of such shows as Top of the Pops and Jim’ll Fix It, famous for his eccentric lifestyle and having raised more than £40million for charity, was a sexual predator who regularly abused girls in their early teens. 

Savile, who died last October aged 84, obviously cannot defend himself against these allegations, but the programme’s presenter, former detective Mark Williams-Thomas, made a compelling case, interviewing a succession of middle-aged women who described how they’d been assaulted by Savile in their youth, as well as people who had witnessed Savile’s behaviour. 

Childline founder Esther Rantzen, a onetime BBC colleague of Savile, looked distraught as she said that she had no doubt that the women who had come forward to tell their stories were telling the truth. Admitting that people had blocked their ears to gossip about Savile, whose charity work had given him an almost saintly status, she said “In a funny way we all colluded in this… we in some way colluded with him as a child abuser.” 

BBC cover-up 

Some have been quick to speak of a BBC cover-up, and of a code of honour among ‘luvvies’, but neither gloating nor point-scoring will undo the harm that Savile did or prevent further abuse by others. 

The reality is that Savile hid in plain sight; colleagues, journalists, and even fans chose to turn a blind eye to his behaviour. 

His 1974 autobiography, As It Happens, describes how in the 1950s he had told a female police officer that if an attractive runaway from a remand home were to come to his club, he would return her to the police but only after keeping her overnight first as his ‘reward’. He did just that, and boasted that the officer’s colleagues had to dissuade her from bringing charges against him. 

Denial 

How could anybody have ignored this? Did they dismiss it as a laddish tall tale? It may simply have been that they didn’t want to believe it. Denial, sadly, is all too often our default response when faced with the reality of abuse. Our own history shows this all too bleakly. 

In 1930, W.T. Cosgrave’s Cumann na nGaedheal government appointed a committee under William Carrigan K.C. to consider if the Criminal Law Amendment Acts of 1880 and 1885 should be amended. The most shocking of the committee’s findings, submitted the following year, was that: 

“…there was an alarming amount of sexual crime increasing yearly, a feature of which was the large number of criminal interference with girls and children from 16 years downwards, including many cases of children under 10 years.” 

The police estimated that under 15pc of such cases were prosecuted, as it was difficult to establish guilt and parents felt it would be better for their children if such cases were kept secret. 

The Department of Justice recommended against the report’s publication, and Cosgrave’s government fell without having decided what to do; de Valera’s Fianna Fáil government set up an all-party committee to consider in confidence how to respond to the report’s findings, but nothing was done. 

It would be easy to dismiss the suppression of the Carrigan Report as emblematic of a less enlightened age, but things have scarcely improved over the last 80 years. Nowadays we don’t hide the truth; we just ignore it. 

In 2002 the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland and the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre published the findings of a massive study on sexual abuse and violence in Ireland. The SAVI Report found, among other things, that 27pc of Irish adults had been sexually abused as children, with half of these having never told anybody of their experiences. Of Ireland’s more than 780,000 adult survivors of childhood abuse, it seems that roughly 530,000 had experienced contact sexual abuse, about 120,000 having been raped. 

Family Circle 

SAVI also found that nearly 60pc of abuse survivors had been abused by people within the family circle including extended family, neighbours, and family friends, 4.6pc having been abused by their babysitters. Just under 1.7pc of abuse was committed by clergy, with a further 1.7pc by teachers who were members of religious orders. 

For every victim whose abuser had been convicted for their crimes, about 200 had never seen justice done. Almost two-thirds of abuse survivors had been abused while under twelve years old. 

So damning a report ought to have defined our national understanding of abuse, and shaped public policy for dealing with it, but instead SAVI’s impact has been negligible, Ireland’s media and politicians having averted their eyes from its findings. 

The current government has made loud noises about protecting children, but its actions have resembled those of generals fighting the last war. Much of the Children First Bill concentrates on abuse within organisations, when it seems that organisational abuse, while not a thing of the past, has already been greatly reduced. 

People generally recognise that most abuse takes place within the family circle, but few realise that relatively little contemporary abuse takes place elsewhere. In 2009 the Irish Times quoted a Garda Detective Sergeant fighting internet paedophiles with Interpol as saying that 85pc of child sexual abuse occurs within the family circle, and the Rape Crisis Network of Ireland revealed that 97pc of abuse survivors who had sought their help the previous year had been abused by people within their family circle. 

As much as a third of Ireland’s sexual abuse is committed by adolescents, but our popular narrative of abuse remains focused on the bogeyman figure of the ‘paedophile priest’, rather than on the teenage boy. 

People would rather believe that abusers are ‘out there’ rather than very close to home. Last September, Father Paddy Banville wrote in this paper that the problems of abuse and cover-up in the Irish Church reflected the problems of abuse and cover-up in Irish society; the ensuing furore was, in the words of the Irish Times critic at the time of the 1907 Playboy Riots, “as if a mirror were held up to our faces and we found ourselves hideous. We fear to face the thing.” 

It’s clear that people rationalise abusive behaviour,  believe that it’ll not happen again, play down the damage that was done, and say that whatever their loved ones may have done, they’re still their brothers, husbands, sons, or friends. Mercy, hope, loyalty, and trust conspire to drive our eyes from the crimes of those we love. 

We need to acknowledge this if we’re to have any hope of eradicating the scourge of abuse from Irish life. Addressing it in the Church has just been the beginning. It’s time to face facts. 

-- A version of this was originally published in The Irish Catholic, 11 October 2012.